User reviews

I first came across Nero Wolfe in the excellent 2001 TV series starring Maury Chaykin – this set in stone my image of the man – I even pictured him when I read this Rex Stout story Fer-de-Lance. Back in the '30's Edward Arnold was a fine and serious actor but he over-egged Wolfe's character in all departments for this one, making him totally unsympathetic and a wonder anyone put up with him. Nowadays of course the character would sneer and laugh at us "fools down on the street" for not using the internet to do everything for them.

A man has a heart attack on a country golf course – sedentary guffawing beer guzzling orchid growing New Yorker Wolfe proves it was murder and the wrong man without moving a muscle but with a lot of help from his comic stooge (in this) Archie. The only person he seems to care for is Marie who supplies him his booze, she plays a significant part as Wolfe's helper in return for finding her brother's killer. There's some ingenious detective work going on here taken at a breakneck speed, but it would have been much better had it been at a more lugubrious pace. And Maisie's repeated question to Archie "When are we gonna get married?" wears awful thin! Favourite bits: John Qualen making up the kitchen table for Archie to sleep on with very mixed emotions in the crowded house; Wolfe's treatment of the young and spry Victor Jory throughout.

All in all some fun moments and I enjoyed it, although utterly unlike the recent TV series - I'm not surprised it didn't work back then based on this screenplay.

To start with, this was a very enjoyable detective mystery from the 1930s, but it just wasn't Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. The story is based on Stout's novel "Fer-de-Lance" but considerably altered, probably due to the difficulty of filming the novel's airplane scenes and to time constraints. The most egregious fault with this movie is turning Archie Goodwin into a psuedo-buffoon and saddling him with a fiance who contributes absolutely nothing to the story line. Nitpicking, Wolfe is too mobile, jolly, and penurious and drinks his beer from the bottle; none of these inaccuracies are necessary. Still, if you can get it to watch (ah, there's the rub) it is an entertaining hour and a half.

I never read Rex Stout books yet, so I can't compare this film adaptation of Fer-De-Lance to that book or the character presentation in this pacey mystery. But as a mystery film it's fairly entertaining with Nero Wolfe, from his home, taking on a case of a man dying on the golf course. There are a number of suspects, and some good deductions.

Nero Wolfe, as played by Edward Arnold, is jolly, and chortles a lot but is sharp-minded, however, I didn't like how he treated his assistant, Archie, played by Hart to Hart star Lionel Stander, like a thicko. Well he is, I guess, but he should get some credit for running around and questioning people.

A good mystery that keeps one watching and the denouement at the end was quite a surprise.

While this first Nero Wolfe film seems well-intentioned, it's really of interest only as an historical curiosity. Edward Arnold, one of the great character actors of all time, looks pretty good as the portly Wolfe, but his portrayal of the detective is way off base. Rex Stout created Wolfe as an irascible, egotistical, curmudgeonly man who quaffs beer endlessly from a glass. Arnold portrays him as a jolly, laughing, hale-fellow-well-met who drinks beer directly from the bottle -- something that Wolfe did very rarely.

Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's amanuensis, legman, and sometime tormentor, is supposed to be a tough, smart, courageous detective in his own right. Lionel Stander, also a fine actor when properly cast and directed, turns Goodwin into a clown.

The plot moves rapidly. Too rapidly, in fact, for the charm of the Nero Wolfe mysteries lies largely in the atmospheric familiarity of their milieu. They are written as if they were stately waltzes, and this films zips by like a two-minute jazz riff.

Of all the adaptations of the Nero Wolfe stories, from the Sydney Greenstreet radio version of the 1940's to the lovingly produced A&E network productions almost sixty years later, the nod must be given to the A&E version, and to Maury Chaykin's portrayal of Nero Wolfe.

If you've never read a Rex Stout Nero Wolfe novel, this is a passably amusing bottom-half-of-the-double-bill picture, moving quickly (except for several scenes in a row that are all talk, when all the exposition is dumped on us) and with quite a few laughs. If, however, you're a Wolfe fan, this will be very dispiriting, with the characters changed to make them far less appealing. Instead of the dignified, aloof Wolfe, Edward Arnold is full of faux-bonhomie, laughing all the time at his own jokes and speaking to Archie in a rude and haughty way. Archie, who in the novel is highly intelligent (just not brilliant, like Wolfe), sophisticated, and attractive (his girlfriend is very rich, beautiful, and clever), is here clumsy and not very bright, and has a low-comedy Brooklyn girlfriend whom he plans to marry and to honeymoon with at...Coney Island! More generally, the problem with the movie is that it is one of those comic mysteries, which are always as unsatisfactory as they are unnatural--murder is not usually regarded as funny; it is sad and frightening and not something to make people rush around telling jokes. The ending in the novel was much better because it was genuinely terrifying--I could hardly breathe while I was reading it--but the ending of the movie is just one more gimmick. The original ending could not have been used because the real terror it inspired would have been out of place in this lightweight movie.

"Meet Nero Wolfe" (1936) is basically a radio play on the screen: the budget is low, the direction practically nonexistent (apart maybe from the opening sequence, set at a golf course). All that matters is the plotting (which is dense enough), the dialogue (which is sometimes lively), and the acting, primarily from the two leads: I have seen Edward Arnold as a supporting character in comedies before, and found him too loud, but this time as the lead he finds the right tone and makes Nero Wolfe pleasingly eccentric. Lionel Stander, looking younger than ever, plays his loyal sidekick. Rita Hayworth, also looking younger than ever, has a very small part. **1/2 out of 4.

What is Nero Wolfe here....

1) Wolfe is a genius... 2) Wolfe prefers to stay at home... 3) Wolfe drinks Beer and tosses the caps in his desk drawer.... 4) Wolfe has an assistant named Archie Goodwin.

What is not Nero Wolfe here.....

1) Wolfe is a generally friendly, avuncular fellow who chuckles and smiles constantly. 2) Wolfe welcomes guests to his home, telling them to return "anytime". 3) Wolfe guzzles Beer...straight from the bottle! 4) Wolfe's assistant Archie Goodwin is a gravel-voiced moron with a Brooklyn accent, who only wants to get away from Wolfe to marry his stereotype dumb blonde Brooklyn accented "galfriend" and Honeymoon at Coney Island, (then become a furniture salesman!)

I could add the other assorted differences...The lack of Archie's narration ( a blessing given this Comic Relief version of "Archie")... Wolfe's 'cook' named Olaf...The stereotype Irish Detective named O'Grady...etc...

Bottom Line: If you are a fan of Nero Wolfe, you will strain to perceive him here. Stick with the A&E series or the books. If, as a collector, you feel you must see this ( as I did ) do not expect anything of consequence and you shall not be disappointed.

After watching this, it is easy to understand why Rex Stout did not care for Hollywood getting it's uncaring hands on his creations.

A man playing golf is stung by a mosquito and has a heart attack. When Nero Wolfe's favorite bootlegger's brother disappears, he sends Archie Goodwin out to look for clues, telling him "Just write down anything that looks unimportant to you."

Edward Arnold was the obvious choice to play Wolfe in this adaptation of Rex Stout's FER-DE-LANCE Lionel Stander makes a fine Archie, and John Qualen is at home with a Scowhegian accent as cook Olaf. Unhappily, the writers lard in all of Wolfe's eccentricities as early and often as possible, and Arnold plays this one chuckling all the time. Director Herbert Biberman's direction seems to have been to let Arnold do pretty much what he wanted. Noteworthy for Rita Hayworth's first appearance in a Columbia feature.

Columbia would try again the following year with THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN. Walter Connally would play Wolfe in that one. Stander, still as Archie, wouldn't seem to notice the switch.

In the 1930's, when the motion picture mystery was having a golden age and studios were sending the latest best sellers straight to film as fast as the top mystery writers could come up with new characters and scenarios, Columbia looked at the success of S.S. van Dine's Philo Vances (First National, Warner Brothers), Dashiel Hammett's Nick & Nora Charles (MGM), Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chans (20th Century Fox) and others building on the oft filmed legacy of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and thought they had a winning entry in Rex Stout's soon to be classic detective Nero Wolfe.

A combination of the irascible brilliance of a Holmes (even author Rex Stout speculated on the intellectual debt if not direct lineage of Wolfe to Holmes' brother Mycroft) and the hard boiled practicality of a Sam Spade with the narrative charm of a Doctor Watson in Wolfe's side-kick/assistant, Archie Goodman, how could a series based on the new characters fail? It probably shouldn't have, but in producing a relatively faithful adaptation of Stout's first Nero Wolfe novel, "Fer de Lance" (the name of a poisonous snake that figures late in the plot), they just missed the challenging tone that won Wolfe fans on the page.

The casting of character actor Edward Arnold, famed for playing outrageous incarnations of the Devil and devilish industrialists was probably a master stroke, but fearing that such an acerbic character might not win viewers, they softened the character and made him too given to "fat man jollity" and too light on the irritated "phoeys." Legman (in more ways than one) Archie followed the unfortunate studio pattern of consigning "Dr. Watson" side-kick characters to comic relief with the miscasting of fine (all too soon to be blacklisted) character actor Lionel Stander. As conceived in both the Nero Wolfe films Columbia managed, Stander's "Archie" was eager but not the skilled detective Stout had created whose own capability made Wolfe all the more brilliant in comparison.

Failings in tone which ultimately doomed the series notwithstanding (along with the failure to find a definitive Nero - Walter Connolly essayed the role in the second and final Columbia film, the 1937 LEAGUE OF FREIGHTENED MEN, based on Stout's second Wolfe novel), MEET NERO WOLFE is a highly entertaining film in its own right.

The murder on the golf course is beautifully filmed with clues clearly enough laid out the sharp viewer can have the fun of guessing ahead of Archie and Nero "whodunnit" and why. Even with too many self conscious laughs from his character, it's a pleasure to see the lighter side of Edward Arnold for a change, and while wrong for a true "Archie Goodman," Lionel Stander gives one of his best performances, and isn't quite as befuddled as Nigel Bruce's classic (but decidedly non-Sherlockian) Dr. Watson.

1936's MEET NERO WOLFE isn't the great Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodman we would eventually get from Maury Chaykin and Timmothy Hutton on TV's A&E Network, but it's solid entertainment and an interesting "might-have-been" look at what should have been one of the classic 30's mystery series in the hands of a studio more sensitive to the demands of producing a classic mystery series.

I am no expert on Nero Wolfe stories, but do know that in some ways Columbia Pictures got the story right and in other ways they dropped the ball. This is no surprise, as Hollywood back in the day often disregarded the original source material...more so than in this film. The biggest way the story differs from the original is the character Archie (Lionel Stander). In the book from which it was based, he was quick-witted and sophisticated. Here, however, it's Lionel Stander playing his usual sidekick duties...and comes off as uncouth and really slow-witted (at best). Fortunately, they got Nero Wolfe closer to the book as well as many of the details of the case.

The story begins with a foursome playing golf. It's interrupted when one of the party drops dead! It's soon reported in the papers that the guy died of a heart attack. Here's a huge problem...the agoraphobic* Nero immediately declares to Archie that the dead man was murdered. How could he know or guess this when all he knows about the story is a tiny blurb in the paper. There's no inside information he's privy to...and the article says the man died from a heart attack. And, given that B-movie detectives are almost always right, when he convinces authorities to exhume and re-examine the body, it is discovered he died from poison...poison from a South/Central American snake, the Fer-de-Lance**.

This film simply isn't for purists....as Columbia, like most all the studios of the day, didn't trust the source material and altered it. If you aren't a purist, the film is enjoyable fluff...much like 100001 other B-mysteries of the era. Edward Arnold is good as Wolfe...but not much else to make it stand out as a mystery movie.



*An agoraphobe is a person who never leaves their home due to the fear and dread of the outside world.

**This snake was said in the film to come from the Argentine. I checked and this snake is NOT found in Argentina but the top of South America and Central America.

A great who-done-it mystery film told with the true spirit of author Rex Stout's genius detective Nero Wolfe.Perfect in size,girth,and bellicosity Edward Arnold portrays the heavyset armchair private investigator as fans of the novels would expect.His man of all tasks,Archie Goodwin(played here for laughs),is portrayed by gravel-voiced character favorite Lionel Stander. Adapted from the first Nero Wolfe novel'Fer De Lance',the mystery in the film begins with a strange death at a golf course which was actually murder.It is a very young Rita Hayworth who hires Nero Wolfe to solve the crime before the police prosecute a loved-one for the murder.The story moves quickly with marvelous red-herrings,interesting clues,murder attempts,and plenty of suspects to choose from(Victor Jory,Walter Kingsford,Frank Conroy). All of the elements from the novels are included :the brownstone mansion,the huge library and red-leather chair,the orchid room upstairs,the endless beer supply,and Wolfe's personal chef played by John Qualen.Columbia pictures had a winner here and there were hopes of a series but,because of Edward Arnold's commitments elsewhere he bowed out after this entry.There was one more Nero Wolfe film following the success of this one.It was 'The League of Frightened Men'(1937),and starred Walter Connolly as Wolfe and Stander returning as Archie Goodwin.

Based on Fer-de-Lance, the first of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe's mystery novels, the film gets the characters all wrong and modifies the plot to the detriment of the story. Archie Goodwin, who narrates the novel, is presented in the film as a doofus and the butt of Wolfe's sadistic sense of humor. The latter laughs incessantly through the film, while in the book he is far more taciturn and correspondingly enigmatic. Fritz, Wolfe's personal chef, comes across as a dignified professional in the novel, in contrast to the servile flunky portrayed in this film. Finally, none of the potential suspects are sufficiently developed in the film thereby removing the opportunity to inject dramatic tension. This is particularly the case in respect to the murder victim's daughter, with whom in the book Archie had a modicum of romantic interest, albeit mostly unexpressed. Instead, a new character is added, Archie's fiancée, presumably to shore up his heterosexual bona fides. Read the novel instead, and then decide if Nero Wolfe mysteries are your cup of tea.

Columbia might have done a whole series of films based om Rex Stout's portly and agoraphobic detective/ Nero Wolfe was a natural for star Edward Arnold who put quite a bit more humor into the part than you would see in the books.

But Wolfe purists would have taken exception to making Archie Goodwin such a dunce fit only for comic relief. Lionel Stander has the part in two Wolfe films and he's the butt of all wisecracks as Arnold belabors him for not being as bright as him. Girl friend Dennie Moore wants Stander to quit and I can't really blame her.

The up and coming Rita Hayworth is the Wolfe client, she's come about the death of her brother. As it turns out the brother was killed in the same manner as a college president with a rare snake venom from South /America.

This could have been a career role as Nick Charles was for William Powell. A nice assortment of suspects are around when the murderer trips himself up.

The film is all right and it's curiosity piece today.

Nero Wolfe was not this jolly or personable. Archie was not a circus clown and was not going to get married. Fritz was not "Olaf". This was a complete miscasting and horrible screenplay. I gave a generous 3 for the effort of putting a Nero Wolfe on the big screen.

Based on Fer-de-Lance, the first of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe's mystery novels, the film gets the characters all wrong and modifies the plot to the detriment of the story.

Archie Goodwin, who narrates the novel, is presented in the film as a doofus and the butt of Wolfe's sadistic sense of humor. The latter laughs incessantly through the film, while in the book he is far more taciturn and correspondingly enigmatic.

Fritz, Wolfe's personal chef, comes across as a dignified professional in the novel, in contrast to the servile flunky portrayed in this film. Finally, none of the potential suspects are sufficiently developed in the film thereby removing the opportunity to inject dramatic tension.

This is particularly the case in respect to the murder victim's daughter, with whom in the book Archie had a modicum of romantic interest, albeit mostly unexpressed. Instead, a new character is added, Archie's fiancée, presumably to shore up his heterosexual bona fides.

Read the novel instead, and then decide if Nero Wolfe mysteries are your cup of tea.